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Baseball is the perfect sport for exploring the paradox of a person’s passion for the game on the one hand, and the analytical precision it provides on the other. If you’ve ever played or are a fan, you know that passion well.

Capturing that passion, respecting it and creating experiences in apps is an extremely difficult thing to do. In baseball, analytics are the punctuation marks in the games’ lexicon, defining its cadence and supporting its uniqueness. What makes baseball great is how it brings together fans, friends, families and entire communities in an amazing way. Analytics and stats make relationships between fans, friends, families and communities closer. Baseball teams are at their best when they are excelling so well on the field their teamwork and results bring entire cities together.

Creating Apps That Enrich Fan Experiences

Major League Baseball Advanced Media (MLBAM) and New Relic sponsored the Bases Coded Technology Challenge. Bases Coded featured a 24-hour hackathon the last weekend of October, coinciding with the 4th game of the World Series. The four finalist teams were invited to Chicago for the hackathon and were given access to MLBAM’s private data and APIs to create their apps, an Amazon Web Services instance to host their apps, and New Relic’s complete product platform to measure app performance. Each team strived to create an excellent fan experience, integrating game data (including team and player stats, live game data), Statcast data, MLB.com content (articles and video), and event attendance information (to understand traffic distribution at stadiums). New Relic assisted with travel expenses so I could attend the hackathon.

Each team took a uniquely different approach to creating a fan experience in their apps. It’s impressive how each team worked very hard to capture the essence of the relationships between the teams and their fans, friends, and families who go to games or watch them together. New Relic’s app performance suite was used to benchmark each app. The Bless You Boys team had the highest performing app, receiving a score of 9.5 out of 10. A screen from New Relic’s Application Monitoring Suite is shown below:

What If Enterprise Apps Put Great Experiences First?

Each of the apps reflected the core strengths of each team, from how they pursued the goal of delivering an excellent experience to their unique programming skills. Here are the key takeaways from watching their app demos and presentations:

The passion each team has for creating empathy with their app’s users is overdue in enterprise software – It was impressive to see how much each of these teams cared about creating an empathetic, engaging experience for their app’s users. Imagine if enterprise app development teams put great experiences ahead of creating software that was easy to code but a challenge to use? The teams in the competition showed how quickly apps could be created that put the customers’ experiences first.

Dropping the barriers to the game’s stats- and analytics-driven lexicon and inviting fans in using great navigation – An app doesn’t have to be hard to use to make it valuable, or be an app that pushes users away with too much complexity. Every team was, in essence, making this point as they walked through their demos and discussed their apps. Chippy All-Stars created Baseball Sherpa, an ambitious effort to infuse empathy into every aspect of the app by exemplifying the values of intuition and empathy. The team even took on the challenge of explaining through contextual app navigation what the Mendoza line is (when a hitter is hitting below .200). Baseball Sherpa also brought in contextual content and had plans for eventually using machine learning to enrich the fan experience further. The team and the app are very impressive.

Apps need to match and enhance the cadence of how fans view, interact with and learn from the game. Both You Pick’em Baseball from The Gordon Shumways team, and C The Ball made impressive strides in app design and development in this area. Both judges and teams agreed baseball games could have innings that are slow followed by intense competition. Each of these teams took on the challenge of managing the slow and fast times of a given game in unique, experiential ways. The You Pick ‘Em App sought to gamify the in-app games and reward users and also invite new fans into the sport. C The Ball was even more ambitious and had plans for a self-learning app that could help fans learn more and appreciate the game.

Obsessed with speed and staying relevant to fans by providing quick analysis of exceptional player performance and plays. Paul Glenn (@pdglenn) and Patrick Whelan (@PdiddyWay), The Bless You Boys team, won the hackathon by doing what every great enterprise app needs to do. First, the app demo told a very tight, precise story and made it immediately relevant to any fan. They combined Twitter and a second-screen design to create a unique fan experience. Their twitter bot (@mlbrobbedtest) is based on live stream data to do a comparative analysis of significant events. When a significant event is found, it’s pushed to the Twitter feed using Tweepi API run via Python code. The result is a Tweet of an exceptional event, often above the existing performance level of a team or player. What’s fascinating about their approach to building this app and bot is the focus on having a very streamlined, small code base with intensive platform support, just like great enterprise apps do.

A few rich analytics and metrics are more powerful than thousands of them – Bless You Boys took an exception-based approach to how they chose and worked with the many stats available to them via the MLB API. They began by looking at pitch velocity and launch angle and considered building spray charts in future releases. The initial app reliably predicts exceptional plays and publishes them on Twitter automatically. Their original goal was to find defensive stats and build their app around them. Being able to find just a few stats on defensive shift could well explain why some hitters continually find themselves hovering near or under the Mendoza line – they could be facing excellent defenses and need to re-evaluate how they hit against a given team.

Bottom line: The future of enterprise software is in good hands with developers who care so much about creating engaging, empathetic experiences for users, and rely on analytics to create greater understanding and insight.